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Jim Carroll

Music, Life and everything else

Livin’ the life, lovin’ the (non-Irish) music

You are an Irish radio station called 2FM. Better still, you are an Irish radio station called 2FM with a public broadcasting remit. OK, you do your best to forget about the public broadcasting remit because it’s a bit of …

Jim Carroll

jimcarroll

Wed, May 16, 2007, 09:52

You are an Irish radio station called 2FM. Better still, you are an Irish radio station called 2FM with a public broadcasting remit. OK, you do your best to forget about the public broadcasting remit because it’s a bit of a drag, but annoying feckers keep bringing it up. Public broadcasting remit means you have certain obligations to your public. They are the ones paying some of your bills when they buy a TV licence every year. You need to make nice with them.

Anyway, you are an Irish radio station called 2FM and it is time for you to do a big TV advertising campaign to highlight the fact that you are fresh, groovy, relevant and all the rest of it. You pay a copywriter or a work experience kid to come up with a terrible slogan (“livin’ the life, lovin’ the music” – they don’t like the letter G for some reason in 2FM). It then takes two attempts to get the ad right (the first one looked as cheap as chips so you went off and spent some more euros on animation). The ad is broadcast. You sit back and wait for the JNLR figures to reflect the success of the campaign.

But the one thing you didnt get right was the music, the song to go with the ad. You’d think a radio station would get this right, wouldn’t you? But, no.

Remember the first paragraph? Irish radio station? Public broadcasting remit? So why the hell is the generic and bland tune soundtracking this huge advertising campaign by the Irish national pop station by a UK-based band called Vega4? Do we not have enough generic and bland bands of our own?

Imagine what such exposure would have done to any number of Irish bands. Imagine how 2FM could have said “hey bitches, we don’t just live the life and love the music but we LOVE Irish music. We rock! We rule! Yahoo!” Imagine how we could have spent the five minutes spent on this blog post on something else.